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On the eve of his Australian tour, Marlon Williams discusses how his very personal fourth album, Te Whare Tīwekaweka, brings together the different facets of his life. By Anna Stewart.
Singer Marlon Williams on connecting with his heritage through the Māori language
The man pictured on Marlon Williams’ album cover wears a top hat so tall that it’s impossible. The figure in the charcoal drawing, in a palette of midnight blue, is heading to the top floor of a triple-storey house via a long, wobbly ladder.
He cuts a slim figure. A two-piece suit that ends just shy of the wrists and ankles accentuates his already spindly limbs. It’s a look that recalls the glint of rockabilly in Williams’ own style. The figure has his back to the artist, but I’m sure if he spun around it’d reveal a fully buttoned-up shirt, like those that Williams tends to wear.
The figure isn’t Williams, though. “I don’t wear top hats,” he tells me. “Mum drew that one when she was pregnant with me. I didn’t clock it until a few years ago, by which time I’d already spent a long time on tour around the world. This album feels very locked in to my family, so it came into view as the right option. I guess I just saw myself in it. It made me think a lot about my life and the way I’ve led it so far.”
We connect over a video call a month before the release of Williams’ fourth studio album, Te Whare Tīwekaweka. Williams is in a black beanie emblazoned with the Batman logo. As he lurches about his home in search of a phone charger or a more comfortable seat, he emits an aura of total calm.
His composure is an impressive feat for someone who stands on the cusp of immense personal and creative vulnerability. In the coming months he’ll release his most intimate album yet and a documentary of its creation. He’s about to embark on an international tour, with dates at the Sydney Opera House on May 29, as part of Vivid LIVE, before two sold-out shows at Melbourne’s Rising festival in June.
The new album, Te Whare Tīwekaweka, is entirely in te reo Māori, a language that is part of Williams’ background, but that he doesn’t speak fluently. Writing the songs was an exercise in connection between the singer-songwriter and his Ngāi Tahu and Ngāi Tai heritage. He was born in Christchurch in 1990, and grew up in the nearby port town of Lyttelton.
In this latest work, Williams has adhered to the Māori proverb “Ko te reo Māori, he matapihi ki te ao Māori”, which translates to: “The Māori language is a window to the Māori world.”
“You can learn a lot about a culture through the way they use language,” says Williams. “The classic example is the Inuits having 200 words for snow – if they’d grown up in the South Pacific, it wouldn’t be the case. I think of it really literally as a way of accessing a world, a culture. That was the most exciting and gratifying part about going into Māori through the language, getting a character of the Māori soul.”
It’s an idea that reverberates throughout Te Whare Tīwekaweka but is at its strongest musically, lyrically and philosophically in the joyous “Korero Māori”. In this song, you can hear Williams’ voice, but he is not the protagonist. Instead, he gives that role to singers from He Waka Kotūia, a youth program that aims to revitalise knowledge of local Māori history and culture through performing arts. Their choral work imbues the melody with communality, while the words they sing – written by Williams – articulate what he imagines his career might look like from the Māori perspective:
I tipitipi haere koe, tuku ihi, tū te wehi,
manahau,
Ki Akaroa, ki Wairewa, ki Waihora, ki Parī kē
e te tau?!
Kua kite kē te mahere o te ao, Ka kite koe, tū
mai rā,
I haere Māori atu, i hoki Māori mai ē.
You’ve travelled all around, impressing people,
gee whiz,
Akaroa, Lake Forsyth, Lake Ellesmere, Paris
even?!
I’ve seen a map of the world and I see you
before me now,
Māori you left, and Māori you returned.
Williams is indebted to Lyttelton-based hip-hop artist and lecturer in te reo Māori at the University of Canterbury KOMMI (Kāi Tahu, Te-Āti-Awa), for helping him with the language.
“KOMMI sings in one of the songs and came on as co-writer for the rest,” Williams says. “In some instances, they gave me lyrics to play with, and in other instances, I would have a whole bunch of really poorly grammaticised Māori that I’d bring to the table.” He laughs. “I definitely wouldn’t have been able to pull this off without their help.”
Auckland-born pop star Lorde (Ella Yelich-O’Connor) also contributed to Te Whare Tīwekaweka, lending her voice to the piano-led duet “Kāhore He Manu E”. Like Williams, Lorde has championed te reo Māori through her songwriting. In September 2021, she released Te Ao Mārama, an EP of five songs from Solar Power, the album she released a month earlier, this time sung in Māori. Williams provides backing vocals on several tracks.
“Ella and I have known each other for a long time now,” says Williams. “When we’re both in a room singing together, we like to nerd out on the nuances of phrasing and things like that. She graciously asked me to sing on the EP that she put out in Māori. And then, the song [of mine] that she sings on, ‘Kāhore He Manu E’, was one that, from its very inception, I could hear her voice on. It was her voice that wrote the melody in my head. It was sort of a no-brainer for me to ask her and I’m just grateful that she would come and return the favour.”
It’s tempting to view Williams and his collaborators as the creative vanguard of a political movement, a cohort of musicians united by a goal to spur social change through their art. But the filmed recording session of “Kāhore He Manu E” – where Williams and Lorde split a tiny piano stool between them, lounging side-by-side with eyes closed as they listen back to their handiwork – depicts an intimacy much closer to the way Williams himself conceives of his album. For Williams, it is the fraught context of his music, rather than his songwriting, that gives it political import.
“The album really started germinating for me in 2019. And I could feel and see the timeline of this record running into the [New Zealand general] election and also the referendum in Australia,” he says. “It was a dark day for the Tasman when we had our election results and you had your referendum results come out, with pretty grim news for both countries. The creation of this record wasn’t political, it was personal – but all albums stand against the political landscape when they come out.”
At the time of Te Whare Tīwekaweka’s release in April, Aotearoa New Zealand saw a fiery debate over its founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi. The controversy began last November, when libertarian politician David Seymour, the leader of ACT New Zealand, tabled the Treaty Principles bill, which sought to redefine interpretation of the Treaty and to weaken Māori rights in the name of broader equality.
The backlash was passionate and immediate. Memorably, following the bill’s first reading in parliament, Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke ripped a copy in half and led a haka. Days later, 35,000 people gathered in protest on the steps of Wellington’s Parliament House. Outrage simmered until this month, when parliament finally voted the bill down.
In a context like this, it’s easy to understand why people see Te Whare Tīwekaweka as a call to action, a provocation even. But for Williams, whatever political capital the album possesses arises from its exposure of Māori culture.
“I’m trying to make a play for the normalisation of everyday experience through a Māori lens,” he says. “There’s this [idea] that to be an Indigenous person is to be inherently political. And I do understand that, in the context of marginalisation. But I think there’s just so many different aspects to it. There’s a whole world of perspectives, experiences and grievances and I think all of these things are important to represent.”
Te Whare Tīwekaweka reflects this complexity through its title – which translates to The Messy House – and its kaleidoscope of themes. “It’s an album mainly of love songs,” says Williams. “But there’s break-up songs, songs that use gardening as a metaphor, songs about lamenting the distance that grows in friendships.”
“ ‘Aua Atu Rā’, the first single, was about living a communal life, where everyone’s in the same boat and owing to each other a terrible loyalty. But it contrasts it with this idea that we’re all ultimately alone in the universe. Both those things feel true. So the song is trying to reckon with that juxtaposition, with the fact that both ideas feel salient.”
As when he’s discussing the political potential of his work, Williams demonstrates a carefully attuned sensitivity to opposing perspectives. He speaks with the awareness of someone who is caught between worlds: Māori culture, English-speaking, small-town life in Lyttelton, touring, family and fandom.
No wonder then that director Ursula Grace-Williams chose to call her documentary about him Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds. The film, which follows Williams through the creation of Te Whare Tīwekaweka, has its Australian premiere at the Sydney Film Festival in June, before a national release later in 2025.
The project’s completion marks the end of a long road. “It was at least four years,” says Williams. “I sort of got used to having a camera in front of me – and then I got scared of being used to it. But I just had to sit back and trust Ursula. She’s telling a story and following me around, and actually, my job is actually sort of simple, in that I’m just making a record and there’ll be this other visual document alongside it … I’m really impressed at what Ursula and her team managed to document and how they portrayed it.”
Promotional material for the film uses an image of Williams that perfectly illustrates its titular metaphor. In a mid-shot against a backdrop of mountains, water and golden-green grass, Williams stares down the barrel of the camera. Draped diagonally across his body from hip to shoulder is a garment woven of dried leaves. “It’s a pake,” he explains, “a traditional, protective raincoat, largely used in the South Island.” Beneath is a fully buttoned shirt.
With the album out and the documentary wrapped, there remains only one stage in Te Whare Tīwekaweka’s life cycle: touring. As he ventures further from Aotearoa New Zealand, Williams knows his audience is less likely to have experienced a meaningful connection to te reo Māori. Undaunted, Williams believes he’ll be more at ease playing Te Whare Tīwekaweka than with any other part in the creative process. Performance is his element, and the means through which he can cement his connection with the language.
“Because I’m not a fluent speaker, I’ve got to be a little bit more careful around the representation,” he says. “But performance is such a natural and organic thing for me. Part of my getting a place within te reo Māori is putting it into a world where it is very natural and instinctual for me. I just want to absorb it and to let it flow out in the same way that I feel a naturalness of performance in English or in any language.”
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